UNRISD is now accepting applications for an internship position, under the supervision of the Deputy Director, in the area of Social and Solidarity Economy.
Required qualifications: Currently enrolled in a Master’s or PhD degree programme in the social sciences;
Good understanding of social economy, sustainable development and social movements issues;
Excellent communication skills including written and spoken fluency in English and experience in editing English texts; good working knowledge of French and Spanish desirable;
Proficiency in MS Office package.

Responsibilities: Follow-up activities related to the 6-8 May 2013 UNRISD conference on the Potential and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy, These are likely to include assisting with editing, preparing publications, updating the website, serving as a communications focal point and other tasks.
Conducting background research on social and solidarity economy issues;
Identifying governmental, intergovernmental and civil society actors and networks supporting social and solidarity economy initiatives and informing them of the outcomes of the UNRISD project on the Potential and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy;

The deadline for applications is 22 April 2013. The internship will be ideally for three to four months, starting mid-June 2013.

If you are interested in the work elaborated above and have the corresponding qualifications, please apply online by clicking the button below and clearly specify your qualifications. Please note that due to limited staff resources only those candidates who are short-listed will be contacted.

The Lady Doth Protest: Mapping Feminist Movements, Moments, and Mobilisations. Women have long participated in and led a wide variety of protests, feminist and otherwise. Their historical participation in movements against, for example, colonialism and militarism; for equal rights and civil liberties; on livelihood issues and against capitalist expansion has routinely thrown up questions about feminist knowledge, praxis, and personal-public life. More recently, the visibility of women on a global scale in the ‘Arab spring’, the North American ‘occupy’ movement and activist marches like the ‘Slut Walk’ and ‘Muff March’ phenomena, makes revisiting debates on women and protest apposite. At the same time, the ‘war on terror’, the so-called death of multiculturalism in Europe, the racialization of religion, and women’s global participation in fundamentalist mobilisations and armed struggle raises new questions concerning the interstices between race, religion, class, sexuality and citizenship. These questions that feminism(s) needs to (re)consider whilst contextualising women in protest and protest more generally lie at the heart of this conference theme. We seek to critically reflect upon the concept of feminist protest – its discourse, image and impact, and to examine the possibility of creative feminist engagement across a spectrum of moments, movements and mobilisations.

We conceive of the term ‘protest’ in its widest sense as both formal and quotidian contentious action existing in a variety of practices including activism, critical pedagogies, literature, film, technologies, art and aesthetics – all of which coalesce around the challenge they mount to multiple hegemonies. By unpacking the concept of protest and expanding existing notions of the political through a feminist lens, we seek to understand how feminist protest, in particular, responds to and emerges within/in spite of, the challenges of our contemporary world. In exploring feminism’s relationship with a wide variety of contemporary concerns, social movements and across a range of disciplines, we invite papers from across the arts, humanities and social sciences, that aim to address the possibilities and complexities of feminist mobilisation within the socio-cultural, political, economic, and pedagogic specificities of the temporal spaces we currently find ourselves in. Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• Women and protest: theoretical, historical, and contemporaneous concerns;
• Sexual and gendered economies of neoliberalism, recession, and austerity;
• Gender, securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism(s);
• The impacts of new forms of (transnational) activism and protest politics on feminism; connecting theory and practice;
• Critical pedagogy and feminist scholarship in times of continuity and change;
• The poetics of protest: literature, music, film, and art;
• Race, Class, Gender and the State;
• Spirituality, Faith, and Religion;
• Feminist temporalities in protest;
• The language and rhetoric of protests, movements and feminist mobility;
• Non or anti-feminist protest;
• Sexuality and protest, and heteronationalisms

Spring 2012 is witnessing a new revolution, a collective action that encourage local citizens to participate to a protest for the creation of a new Bridge in Jal-El-Dib METN after the dismantlement of the old bridge;

Arguments on the Facebook group are numerous, some are funny some are realistic, all are an expression of the people’s will to ask for a new bridge:

“After the illegal freezing of their private properties for more than 40 years in pursuit of a fictious expropriation scheme, they are blocking the entrance and the exit to the whole Metn region. This is a systematic act of killing the Metn region. We must resist!”

for me, the peaceful collective action that is organized by citizens to make their living conditions better is an expression of their sense of responsibility;

As for me, and because I live in Jal-El-Dib, and used to use this bridge to get in and out of Jal-El-Dib, I think it is a must for the people responsible of our transportation and roads to make sure to replace the old bridge by a new one, or a tunnel, that will make our life easier;